Albert Vögler

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Albert Vögler (1933)

Albert Vögler (born February 8, 1877 in Borbeck , † April 14, 1945 in Herdecke , district Ende ) was a German politician , entrepreneur and general director of the then second largest steel group in the world, United Steelworks .

Life

Vögler's career began with the Dortmund Union . After the Union was taken over by the German-Luxemburgish Mining and Huts-AG in 1910 he became a deputy member of the board , in 1912 a full board member and in 1917 chairman of the board of directors of Deutsch-Luxemburg. During the First World War he was a supporter of an aggressive policy of annexation. At a conference between industrialists and Chancellor Georg Michaelis on August 29, 1917, he said:

“Our (ore) needs from Germany covered for a maximum of 60 years; with Briey 40 years longer. France has ore for 600 years. We would be at war 10 more years to buy Briey. "

At a meeting of the Reich Association of German Industry in March 1924, Vögler identified himself as a supporter of the people without space thesis and, according to the historian Karsten Heinz Schönbach, already indicated that the necessary space for Germany was in the east.

“The natural basis of every economy is the soil with its organic and inorganic yields. The earth has an unpleasant quality, it is not getting any bigger. We Germans in particular are squeezed into a space that is far too small. Our own has the least place among the great peoples of the earth. [...] The countries to the east and south-east of us encompass wide areas; there the state is ruler over a great nature. "

In 1919 he became a member of the economic association for the promotion of intellectual reconstruction forces , which provided the capital for the nationalist press empire of Alfred Hugenberg . In 1925 he became director of the Rhenish-Westphalian coal syndicate .

Since 1922 he was a board member of the Gäa , which spread right-wing mass propaganda and became the most important right-wing propaganda outlet in southern Germany. In 1926 Vögler was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

After the death of his sponsor Hugo Stinnes in 1924, he campaigned for the formation of the largest European steel company, Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG , founded in 1926 , of which he became the first chairman of the board. He held this position until 1935. He then moved to the company's supervisory board , which he belonged to until his death. In 1926, together with Alfred Pott , he played a key role in founding the Society for Coal Utilization, from which Ruhrgas AG developed.

Vögler also held other supervisory board mandates at RWE , Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG and the Saar and Mosel mining companies . He was also a presidential member of the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie , chairman of the Association of German Ironworkers , today's steel institute VDEh , and a member of the main board of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industries (VDESI).

In 1919 Vögler was a co-founder of the German People's Party , to whose right wing he belonged. He was a member of the Weimar National Assembly , was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924 and sharply criticized Chancellor Joseph Wirth's policy of compliance . Vögler therefore advised his party to collaborate with the anti-republican DNVP. Nevertheless, after the collapse of the German resistance to the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, he had to sign the MICUM agreement that France and Belgium would control the Ruhr area. As a German expert in drafting the Young Plan in 1929, he did not want to sign such a signature a second time and therefore resigned in protest before the negotiations were over. Instead, he advocated rejecting the Young Plan, whereupon foreign countries would withdraw its short-term loans and an economic crisis would make Germany unable to meet its reparation obligations. In the subsequent renegotiations, the reparations could then be reduced to an affordable level.

Vögler and the NSDAP

In a speech at a conference of the Reich Association of German Industry in March 1924, Vögler stated:

“In the difficult times ahead, our workers and employees must hold firm to their businesses. They must and will come to the conviction that the private sector is the most profitable form of economy for them too. It must be our task to restore the working class with a national spirit. The disputes over wage and collective bargaining issues will continue. But when they are over, we want to find each other in common national thinking. "

That is why he had to please a party like the NSDAP , which was committed to nationalizing the German workers. That is why Vögler financed the NSDAP at an early stage, so wrote Vögler and Fritz Springorum in 1923 to the Bavarian Prime Minister Gustav Ritter von Kahr , as Kahr writes in his memoirs:

"They 'are' sympathetic towards Hitler , who had made a breach in the social democratic working class with his movement , and have repeatedly supported him financially, but he shouldn't do anything stupid."

As a member of the Ruhrlade , Vögler helped finance the bourgeois parties of the Weimar Republic. Donations to the NSDAP can only be proven from 1931 onwards, so in December 1931 the Upper President of Saxony wrote to the Prussian Interior Minister Carl Severing that, according to information from industrial circles, Vögler “made substantial contributions to the NSDAP last spring”. On September 11, 1931, he met Hitler personally. In 1932 he became a member of the Keppler circle . In contrast to many other large industrialists , Vögler and his deputy Ernst Poensgen were present at Hitler's speech to the Düsseldorf Industry Club , in which the latter presented his “economic program” on January 26, 1932 . Vögler, however, was disappointed with the speech and warned in the General-Anzeiger for Dortmund "most urgently against the National Socialist experiments". In the final phase of the Weimar Republic, he strongly advocated Hitler's chancellorship. But in November 1932 he signed the appeal of a "German Committee" close to the DNVP , which, under the heading "With Hindenburg for the people and the Reich!", Spoke out in favor of the Papen government , for the DNVP and thus clearly against the NSDAP. After Papen's meeting with Hitler on January 4, 1933 in the house of the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder , at which a coalition with the NSDAP was discussed, Vögler met with other industrialists Franz von Papen at Fritz Springorum on January 7, 1933 in Dortmund. Presumably the new power perspective was discussed there.

After the " seizure of power ", Vögler took part in the secret meeting of industrialists with Hitler on February 20, 1933 , at which campaign aid of 3 million Reichsmarks was decided for the NSDAP. From November 1933 until the end of the war in 1945, Vögler was a member of the NSDAP parliamentary group in the National Socialist Reichstag .

Second World War

During the Second World War , Vögler worked under Albert Speer in the Ministry of Armaments and, as the Reich Minister's General Plenipotentiary, was responsible for armaments and war production in the Ruhr area. From 1941 to 1945 he was President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society ; in 1936 he had already received the Harnack Medal of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which is awarded for services to society. From 1925 until his death he was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

Towards the end of the war he became a member of the opposition "Reusch Circle" (after Paul Reusch ), which had close contacts with the resistance movement around Carl Goerdeler .

To avoid being arrested by the US Army , he committed suicide in 1945 in his Gut Haus Ende in Herdecke. His final resting place is in the Protestant cemetery Kirchende, Kirchender Dorfweg.

Movies

  • Gerolf Karwath: Hitler's elite after 1945 . Part 3: Entrepreneurs - Profiteers of injustice . Director: Holger Hillesheim. SWR, 2002.

literature

  • Gert von Klaß : Albert Vögler. One of the greats of the Ruhr area. Wunderlich, Tübingen 1957.
  • Wolfgang Kessler: Every work is there for people and is created and carried by people - Albert Vögler, a citizen of Herdeck for a long time. In: Herdecker Blätter. Issue 10 (November 1996), ZDB -ID 1234123-x , pp. 23-33.
  • Ulrike Kohl: The Presidents of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Max Planck, Carl Bosch and Albert Vögler between science and power (= Pallas Athene. Vol. 5). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-515-08049-X (also: Berlin, Humboldt University, dissertation, 2001).
  • Manfred Rasch : About Albert Vögler and his relationship to politics. In: Bulletin of the Institute for Social Movements. Researches and Research Reports. Vol. 27, 2003, pp. 127-156, doi : 10.13154 / mts.28.2003.127-156 .
  • Manfred Rasch: Albert Vögler (1877-1945). In: Westphalian pictures of life. Bd. 17, ZDB -ID 222275-9 = Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia. Vol. 17A, 2005, pp. 22-59.
  • Karin Jaspers / Wilfried Reinighaus: Westphalian-Lippian candidates in the January elections 1919. A biographical documentation , Münster: Aschendorff 2020 (Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia - New Series; 52), ISBN 9783402151365 , pp. 193f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Fischer : Reach for world power. The war policy of imperial Germany 1914/18. Completely revised special edition due to the 3rd edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1967, p. 218.
  2. ↑ Publications of the RDI, issue 21, April 1924, p. 34. Quoted from Karsten Heinz Schönbach: The German Corporations and National Socialism 1926–1943. Berlin 2015, p. 53.
  3. ↑ Stephan Malinowski : From the king to the leader. German nobility and National Socialism (= Fischer 16365 The time of National Socialism ). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-16365-X , pp. 456 ff., (At the same time: Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 2001).
  4. ^ Publications of the Reich Association of German Industry. Issue 21, April 1924, ZDB -ID 719218-6 , p. 38.
  5. ↑ Georg Franz-Willing : The Hitler Movement. Origin of the Hitler movement 1919–1922. 2nd, improved edition Schütz, Preußisch Oldendorf 1974, ISBN 3-87725-071-3 , p. 288.
  6. ^ Georg Franz-Willing: The Hitler Movement 1925 to 1934. Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, Preußisch-Oldendorf 2001, ISBN 3-920722-64-7 , p. 333.
  7. ↑ Eberhard Czichon : Who helped Hitler to power? On the share of German industry in the destruction of the Weimar Republic (= votes at the time. 5, ZDB -ID 521481-6 ). Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1967, p. 21.
  8. ↑ Walter Knips: The present of the past: Heil, Herr Hitler . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 2001 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Ian Kershaw : Hitler. 1936-1945. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-30842-7 , p. 53.
  10. ↑ Manfred Rasch: About Albert Vögler and his relationship to politics. In: Bulletin of the Institute for Social Movements. Vol. 27, 2003, pp. 127–156, here p. 104.
personal data
SURNAME Vögler, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DVP), MdR and manager
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Borbeck
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1945
Place of death Herdecke